Dragon Sword (7 page)

“
What’re you…What mom?”

“
Margarite Sands! My mom hasn’t
been

‘
Franchon’ since she got married!
To my dad!”

“
Margarite? She’s not married.” Dan
stares at me. “She would have told me. Are you pre- tending to be
her kid?”

Pretending? That’s it. I officially
hate this guy. Without thinking about it, I slam the oboe down on
the floor.

Out of the corner of my eye, I see
a security guard hurrying over. And Herb Caen, too. Oh, great — now
I’m gonna be in a newspaper!

The guard grabs me around the
waist.

Dan just stands there, blinking.
“Margarite…Margarite’s married?”

“
You bet she is!”

“
And you’re really
her…?”

“
I’m her kid!” Oh, great, now
everybody in 1941’s got
me
saying “kid.” And I guess I just
blew the whole “teacher-student” cover.

“
Well, jeez, kid, I never —” He
looks around the room. “Where is she?”

“
She’s with Gravlox! So I guess
she’s doing a little better in the band than
you
are!”

The guard pulls me away. “It’s all
right, Mr. Sterning. I’ll throw this little runt out.”

“
Wait a minute. Let me talk to
him,” says Dan, who just picked up his dented oboe.

He puts his hand on my shoulder to
draw me aside, but I jerk away.

“
It’s possible we have a little
misunderstanding here,” he says.

“
That’s one way to put
it.”

“
Did you say Margarite
—”

“
My mother!”

“
Your mother is with Gravlox?
Tonight?” “Yeah.”

“
But…” He looks around, frustrated.
“But they’re not supposed…Did they go to the fort?”

Of course, I don’t even know what
“the fort” is, but I’m sure as heck not gonna tell this
guy.

“
What’s it to you?” I
ask.

He’s not just frustrated now, but
jumpy. Then he does about the last thing I was expecting: He lifts
up his oboe, or what’s left of it, and blows, playing what almost
sounds like another few bars of “We Three Kings.”

Then something happens that’s even
more unexpected: The lights go out. Now the museum is lit only by
candles. It’s eerie, but kind of cool. I don’t have time to think
about it, though, because there’s commotion—I hear voices and what
sounds like shoving — and then the candles start getting tipped
over. It’s pitch dark.

Then comes the sound of breaking
glass. And screaming.

Chapter Eight

Clyne: Zoo

2019 C.E. November.
Monday.

I am in a place they call the zoo.
A zoo is supposed to be a collection of different species,
“animals” as they say here, which are put on display. But right now
I seem to be the only object on view for my human
keepers.

They brought me here after
capturing me on the roof of Sandusky-sire’s lab. I rode in the
cold, dark hold of one of their air machines.

Like the animals in a zoo, they
have a species name for me, too: Troodon.

I looked it up on one of their
computing devices. A troodon is a type of Saurian — a “dinosaur”—
that used to live on this Earth. Their theory is that I am an
evolved version of one. Or more likely, the Earth Orange humans
think, I am a “space alien,” even though it is they, of course, who
live in the far reaches of space and time.

“
Are you invading us?” the female
known as Thirty asked me.

“
Invade?
Kkkk…taa!
” She had
it all wrong. “I simply wish to get back home before the school
year is terminated and final marks are handed in.”

“
This can be like a school, too. We
can learn from each other. I want you to trust me.” She smiled at
me. “I’ve read the reports of what happened out at the Sandses’
lab, with Eli and the girl you were traveling with. I want to help
get your friends back.”

She wanted to help me, yet she was
still called by her number. Thirty. On Saurius Prime, we are
numbered only until we leave our community nests to undergo our
Passage Calls, in which we get our life-names.

If she didn’t qualify for a real
name yet, she was probably still much too young to be out by
herself. Perhaps she was being given some kind of test, and I
should humor her to help her win high marks. “Back from
ting!
where?”

“
From wherever they’ve gone in
time. Your friend Eli is supposed to be working for us.”

“
Who is ‘us’?”

“
I’m part of the government here.
That’s all you need to know.”

“
In truth, young friend, there is
much more I would love
sktt!
to know. Can you
k-kk
tell me what happened to the Saurian race here? And can you
ascertain, please, whether I am still
pk-pan!
an
outlaw?”

“
Why do you think you’re an outlaw,
Mr.”— she glanced down at a screen where she appeared to keep some
notes —“Klein. That’s an Earth name, too. Is it one you picked up
here?”

She said it wrong, not quite with a
Saurian pronunciation. “Clyne,” I corrected her, as gently as I
could.

“
Klein. Yes.” She nodded. “How did
you pick that name? Did you meet someone named Klein?”

“
Yes, well. I would meet ‘Clyne’
tk-bng!
in the Fifth Dimension only if I passed myself
t-t-kh!
coming while I was going. Or versa vice. And that
would result from sloppy piloting and deduct points off
pk-pk-pk!
my final marks.”

“
The Fifth Dimension? Is that how
you got here?”

“
Why, yes! How else
kt!
could I find an Earth so full of
k-pt-chk!
surprises?”

“
Were you trying to surprise us,
Mr. Klein?” Here the one called Thirty leaned over to peer at me
closely, as if I were a project in science class. “Were you here to
arrange a sneak attack?”

“
Sneak attack?” It was a type of
Earth Orange phrase I hadn’t heard before. Then I figured it out.
“Oh!
p-p-pw!
A shadow move! Like in Cacklaw!”

Then Thirty appeared to grow very
frustrated. She put down her stylus and stopped taking notes. “Like
in war, Mr. Klein. When you’re done with your games, perhaps we’ll
talk again.

She exited the room, and I was
escorted back to the quarters where they kept me locked up. Why did
she get so upset if she knew that Cacklaw was a game? I was
actually quite impressed — few mammals on Earth Orange appear to
have heard of it.

One time, she and the one called
Howe gave me a bio-reconnoiter. I was tied to a table, with my eyes
propped open. They poked my hide, clipped off bits of my claws and
put them in sample jars, measured my tail, and looked at my
tongue.

Apparently Saurian medicine was a
mystery to them, and I was their training ground.

“
We think,” Howe said, “that you
are
a troodon. One that evolved to be like us, with two legs
for standing upright and a large brain. You would have
been
us, would have kept right on evolving, been this Earth’s top
species, if that meteor hadn’t hit.” He was sweating a little bit,
and I wasn’t sure why he was getting so mad, since I was the one
who was restrained and getting prodded. “Do you get angry knowing
our kind is in charge here?”

If he meant that he and Thirty were
actually the leaders of the humans, it wasn’t anger that I was
feeling so much as increased nervousness.

“
Oh, we know what you are, all
right. We just don’t know where you’re from. Our own past? Another
planet? But we’ll figure it out. If you’re a scout for an invasion,
if you came to steal the Earth from us, it won’t work. We’ll figure
it out.”

“
Stealing
k-k-tu!
is
strictly forbidden on
pk!
field trips!” In response, Howe
tightened some of the straps to make it more difficult for me to
speak.

“
Howe, maybe you need to take a few
deep breaths. Perhaps he was ready to talk.”

“
Talk!” Howe bellowed back at
Thirty. “He’s just playing mind games with us!”

Games again! These two Earth Orange
mammals had the strangest way of playing!

Howe’s face turned a different
color, just like the small, four-legged stickleplumes do on
Saurius, and he stomped away, letting Thirty take over. “We won’t
give up, you know,” she told me. “Our planet’s security is too
impor- tant. We will eventually accommodate each other. One way or
another.”

Maybe she was hinting that
eventually the games here would actually become fun. But I doubt
it.

I am now a “prisoner,” which is
even more restrictive than being an outlaw. Prisoners are not
permitted to play too many games. Aside from that, conditions,
under the circumstances, are acceptable: They observe me, feed me
oranges when I ask for them — and freshly chopped mammals, even
when I don’t. Those they serve raw, which they incorrectly assume I
like. They have yet to know the wonders of fern-wrapped meat cooked
on hot volcanic rocks.

They have also allowed me use of
the crude knowledge and communication machine they refer to as
“that twenty-year-old piece of junk.” They left some tools. It
appeared this was a sneak test, a stealth quiz, the kind you hear
about in the upper grades. They wanted to observe me perform a
mechanical operation.

So I fixed the machine.

That excited them so much they gave
me a stack of round flat discs to use, one called a
World
Book
, another about dinosaurs, another about constellations.
The machine basically reads information off the discs, and they’ve
all been very interested to see what sort of research I can do with
such primitive devices.

At times, I am not quite sure if I
am a prisoner, after all, or simply here to help them with
their
homework. They seem to be worried about some
assignment they can’t discuss yet and are constantly whispering
about among themselves. Perhaps another sneak test for me? Or are
Howe and Thirty being given one by someone else?

I mentioned this was a zoo. I think
the humans keep other beings they consider strange, or perhaps even
dangerous, here. But unlike the one where Eli and I crash-landed in
Alexandria, here the inhabitants are not free to roam
about.

I hear them, though, when I’m moved
around the grounds — other voices, not all of them human-, or even
mammal-sounding. One time, passing a door, I saw what looked like a
large, round black eye peering out at me. But I couldn’t be sure.
It quickly pulled away from the grate. And I was hurried
along.

I’ve never really seen the
other…prisoners? Or shall I say classmates? Whoever they are, they
keep us all separate. I am taken out of my quarters once a day,
into a space called “the yard.”

“
This place is for you to exercise.
To move about. Do you understand?” The guards speak to me in a
slow, deliberate cadence, as if I were still young enough to have
only a number, too.

“
Yes. Can you understand me
skt!
as well?” I thought it was only courteous to make
sure.

“
Sure, I under — hey, it doesn’t
matter if
I
understand!”

“
It doesn’t?”

“
I’m supposed to ask
you
the
questions!”

I’m not sure what sort of research
goes on here, or what kind of quarantine I’m under. But the mammals
overseeing this oddly spliced-together institute —
zoo-prison-school — are especially prickly and defensive. I wish
Eli were here to explain more of his world to me.

Or, perhaps, to explain more of me
to his world.

“
Go on now, move! This is your
fifteen minutes of
fun
! Run! Jump!” The guard prods me with
his stick, and I start to move around the yard, taking a couple of
flying leaps just to keep my hind-hoppers tuned up.

During yard breaks, I also get to
record notes like this into the altered lingo-spot. I hope
eventually I can transfer these remarks to the proper forms and
worksheets, so I can present this adventure as legitimate
classwork.

“
Move along!” The guard doesn’t
like me to slow down. I believe he considers it a kind of
resistance.

I jump some more, hopping from one
ray of sunlight to another, making a small game of it for myself,
imagining I’m working my way — with medium acceleration — through a
fallen grid in Cacklaw. There’s a dome over most of the complex
here. I flew over it, watching from the net that carried me under
their roto-spinning flying machines, and could see that it’s
designed to look like part of the surrounding hills to the world
outside. Despite the camouflage, a few sections are crafted to let
in true sunlight, which they use to help warm the area. Like a
greenhouse, the dome keeps some of the heat from
escaping.

I’m jumping faster now, leaping
across the yard, clearing several beams of sunlight at once. If I
ever do get back, I may not become a top-stomper in Cacklaw, but
with practice, I could be a proficient midstepper.